Help Failing Disk Problem

[Roland Smith]

On Mon, Nov 05, 2007 at 03:16:46PM +0000, James wrote:
> > rsync is too high-level, and may not do exactly the right thing with 
> > links or sparse files or who knows what. 
> 
> rsync -cav takes cares of symlinks and all that just right. It's a
> beautiful thing.
> 
> Checksumming, too. Ah, bliss.

It doesn't necessarily do the right thing with flags, acls and other
extended attributes,

> >  dd is too low-level--you get 
> > the same partition table/bsdlabel and the exact same slice/partition 
> > sizes.  That's okay on an identical hard drive, but a pain on one that's 
> > larger.
> > dump, on the other hand, is just right.

> If the file names on the drive change during the dump, corruption can
> occur. At least on linux. I remember Torvalds ranting about it on a
> mailing list. I imagine FreeBSD suffers the same issue, though, as it's
> a pretty generic problem.

For starters, you should _never_ dump a live filesystem. What you can do is
dump a snapshot of a live filesystem, using dumps '-L' option, because a
snapshot is like a frozen image of the filesystem; it doesn't change.

Dump & restore is the best way to move data and all attributes to a
larger disk. See §9.2 of the FAQ.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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